Global sales of cloud IT hardware were up 25.1 percent in the first quarter of 2015 over a year earlier to nearly US$6.3 billion, according to an IDC survey.

In another sign of the movement of more and more data into Cloud services, global first-quarter sales of Cloud-related hardware rose 25.1 per cent year-on-year, to nearly $US6.3 billion, according to an IDC survey.

While sales of infrastructure equipment that was unrelated to cloud services grew by 6.1 per cent, revenue related to infrastructure for private Cloud services was up 24.4 per cent to $2.4 billion while that for public cloud services increased 25.5 per cent to $3.9 billion.

Servers in particular were in high demand, posting sales growth of around 30 percent for cloud applications, while storage systems and Ethernet switches also saw strong growth.

Vendor revenues from Cloud IT equipment sales expanded globally except in Central and Eastern Europe, IDC said, noting political and economic turmoil in the region.

Hewlett-Packard, which in May reported a 21 per cent profit drop from a year earlier, continued to lead worldwide Cloud IT vendors with a 15.7 per cent market share, up from 14.3 per cent a year before. It was followed by Dell, Cisco Systems, EMC, NetApp and Lenovo.

Lenovo saw its revenue shoot up by 770 per cent due in part to its acquisition of IBM's x86 server business. The $2.1 billion deal, including IBM's System x, BladeCenter and Flex System blade servers and switches, as well as the NeXtScale and iDataPlex servers and software, began closing in September 2014.

IBM, which retained its System z mainframes, Power Systems, Storage Systems, Power-based Flex servers, PureApplication and PureData appliances in the Lenovo deal, has continued to push cloud technologies, recently partnering with online storage firm Box to allow its users to apply Watson Analytics technologies to their content.

Related Whitepapers

Copyright 2018 IDG Communications. ABN 14 001 592 650. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of IDG Communications is prohibited.